My mum named me after the Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachan, a suave star of Indian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. The reference was entirely lost on my classmates at school in a very white part of southern England in the early 2000s.
When you’re that age, any point of difference is a source of deep embarrassment, and having a foreign name is just another one in the mix—from shrugging off rhyming jibes to correcting, or being too shy to correct, mispronunciations. (Amir, Ahmed—even now, the way I say my own name to people outside my family isn’t actually correct.)
But you grow into your name, I think. And as I got older I started to appreciate the relative uniqueness of it, to carry it more lightly. Whether you like your name or not, it becomes the badge you present to the world—your “personal brand.” But it’s also a source of information about you—names “send signals about who we are and where we come from,” writes Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker. And sometimes those signals can be damaging.
On August 1, Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s health secretary, accused the Little Scholars Nursery in Dundee of discriminating against his young daughter on the basis of her name. When Yousaf’s wife Nadia El-Nakla emailed the nursery to ask about places for their 2-year-old daughter Amal, she was told there were no spaces available. But a friend with a more white-sounding name who emailed the next day was offered a choice of three afternoons and a tour of the nursery. Follow-up enquiries from a journalist employing a similar tactic got the same result—the fictitious parent with the Muslim-sounding name was denied a place at the nursery for their child, while applicants with white-sounding names were given options and information on how to enroll.
It would be easy to shrug this off as an isolated incident, but it’s not. Decades of research has found that name discrimination in education and employment is very real. A cleverly designed study in the United States found that candidates with Black-sounding names needed eight more years of experience to get the same number of callbacks as those with white-sounding names, for instance. Similar research over decades has found the same effect.
I found Humza Yousaf’s story deeply troubling. I’m 33, a few years younger than he is, and my wife and I are about to buy a house together. I’ve been obsessing over the demographics of the areas we’re looking at moving to, trying to smooth the way for our hypothetical children. Maybe I should have spent the time devising a more English-sounding surname to give them.
Yousaf’s experience made me think, for really the first time in my life, about my name and the impact that it has had on my personality and my career path. Would I be a completely different person if I’d been called something different? How many doors have been slammed in my face without me even knowing about it? Is my name ruining my life?
The most recent work on this in Europe is the GEMM survey, a five-year, five-nation field study where researchers applied for thousands of real jobs using a mixture of different names (GEMM stands for Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration, and Markets). The results are shocking. Ethnic minorities needed to send 60 per cent more applications to get as many callbacks as the white majority.
I’d thought that being from a well-represented group (British Asians) and living in a relatively diverse city (London) might shield me from the worst of these effects, but actually the opposite seems to be the case. Countries with a longer history of immigration from former colonies seemed to have higher rates of discrimination. British employers were the most discriminatory in the study, which also looked at Norway, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. “We were a bit surprised by that,” says Valentina di Stasio, an assistant professor at Utrecht University who worked on the research. “In Britain it’s very high by international standards.”
The effect held across countries and different types of jobs—from high-skilled back-end roles in software to customer-facing vacancies in the service industry. In Britain, there was a clear and depressing hierarchy in terms of which ethnic groups were favored in the jobs market: White sounding names got the most responses, then Western European, followed by Eastern European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and finally African.
Di Stasio and her colleagues were able to compare the British data with similar studies conducted in the 1960s, when my grandparents and parents arrived in this country and faced abuse and outright hostility from some of their neighbors. “We saw that the level of discrimination faced by South Asians and Pakistanis was as strong today as it was at the end of the 1960s, in terms of the level of discrimination that applicants faced,” di Stasio says.
On the face of it, society has moved on since then—but discrimination may have morphed from a brick through your window into something more insidious and pervasive. In the future, hiring algorithms trained on biased human decisions could perpetuate discrimination and lock it in for decades.
I wanted to get a sense of what was driving this phenomenon, so I spoke to Sonia Kang, an associate professor at the University of Toronto in Canada who has conducted extensive research into name discrimination and CV whitening. “I don’t think it’s really active racism” she says, pointing instead to subtle processes and things like name fluency. “If a hiring manager sees a name that they don’t know how to pronounce, they might think, ‘I didn’t want to say their name wrong so I skipped that one and went to the next one.’”
Although many companies say they embrace diversity, in practice this makes little difference—and probably won’t until the demographics of people making hiring decisions reflect the country at large. Kang found that companies with diversity statements on their websites were just as likely to discriminate against candidates with nonwhite names, and in fact may be making matters worse for ethnic minority candidates who could be “tricked into a false sense of security.”
Name discrimination isn’t just limited to race—researchers at Syracuse University in New York have found that female names tended to be rated as less competent, while male ones were seen as less warm. Women with soft-sounding names like Sophie are perceived as more attractive; for men it’s short, sharp names like Jack. People with old-fashioned names are treated differently.
Name-blind recruitment can help, particularly for entry-level roles. But Kang’s research has found that other signifiers of race and religion in a person’s CV can hamper their chances—volunteering at your local church may boost your job prospects; doing so at your local mosque might not. Horizontal recruitment is another potentially beneficial approach. Rather than looking at the entirety of each CV in turn, you compare them in sections, scoring all the candidates on each part before coming up with an overall score that’s less influenced by their personal details.
Personally I think one of the hardest things about the job market is not knowing how much of a role discrimination might be playing. Did your application get rejected because you don’t have enough experience? Or did it just get binned because they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to say your name? “As a single individual, it’s very hard to prove discrimination, and that’s why it’s underreported,” says di Stasio.
I know people who’ve resorted to the nuclear option of sending in the same application under a white pseudonym. But this rarely yields satisfactory results—there are too many variables. You need the scale of academic research to really see what’s going on. Kang and her colleagues sent out 16,000 job applications as part of their research, for instance. Yousaf’s case is unusual in that he and his wife managed to get something close to a smoking gun—he is now pursuing legal action against the nursery, which denies any wrongdoing.
All that means is that it’s hard to quantify the impact my name has had on my life. No, it hasn’t ruined it—I’m in a good job, in a great city, doing something I enjoy. But still, it’s hard not to play Sliding Doors in your head, and wonder what life might have looked like for Adam rather than Amit. It was probably somewhat harder for me to get a job, initially. I remember being completely unable to get work experience when I was writing to companies as a 15-year-old, while my peers secured placements at law firms and newspapers. I might have ended up in a completely different career, or been more (or less) successful in the one I’m in now.
But the die might have been cast before that. “There’s sorting that happens throughout your life,” says Kang. “Those kinds of barriers come up again and again.” Was I treated differently by teachers who couldn’t say my name properly? Did discrimination play a role in the nursery I went to, or the friends I made, or the grades I was given? I’ll never know.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to disassociate name discrimination from straight up racism. But research from Sweden found that immigrants who adopted Nordic-sounding surnames had better outcomes than those who kept their original names—their earnings increased by 26 percent on average. (In the UK, it costs £18 to change your name by deed poll.) There’s been little research done on the role first names might play, but some studies suggest that mixing Western-sounding first names with foreign surnames “isn’t enough to eliminate the discrimination,” Kang says.
Names can open doors, and they can also close them. It’s why some countries maintain lists of banned names—in Italy, for instance, it’s illegal to call your child Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, or Joey Tribbiani; every year New Zealand publishes a list of names that have been declined for various reasons (2018’s list reads like a Burger King menu).
It’s why some people feel the need to resort to changing their name altogether to ease their path —whether that’s by anglicizing a surname, shortening a first name to make it more pronounceable to Western tongues, or abandoning it and adopting a new one altogether.
In fact, even Amitabh Bhachan, the Bollywood star for whom I was named, isn’t actually using the name he was born with. He was born Amitabh Shrivastava. His father changed the family name when the actor was a boy, afraid that the family’s “low-caste” surname would keep his son from getting into school.
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
